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Island
Island is the fourteenth chapter of The Beginner's Guide. Description Level This level begins in a completely white environment. The player asks a question and a chunk of land appears. An unseen character starts talking to the player, revealing more chunks of land (or more "islands") as the talk continues. The player agrees to help this character to solve a puzzle if they tell the player where the "machine" that makes their ideas is. After passing through a Torii, the player helps the character to solve the puzzle (which is revealed to be the two-doors puzzle) and then exits through a Torii again. The unseen character tells the player that, in exchange for helping them solve the puzzle, they will guide the player to the machine (presumably the Whisper Machine from Whisper and Machine). In the next part, there are several boxes with sentences (dialogs from this and previous levels). The character tells the player they will see the machine if they keep saying good things about their work of making games. As the game continues, more sentence boxes will fall until the unseen character finally says they are free and reveals that the player is outside the furniture room prison (next to a lamppost). A crying woman can be seen inside it. Narration If the last game featured Coda talking explicitly about his creative frustrations, this one turns it up to eleven. Now, put yourself in my shoes playing this. Here's a friend whose work is exhibiting signs of struggle, frustration, anxiety, depression even. And yet still he keeps making games. He keeps throwing himself into the grinder even when he clearly doesn't have the energy for it anymore. Why? What is it for? Because from my perspective at the time and just what I knew of him, this was a result of how isolated he was. He was in his own little bubble, sitting at his own computer all day, not really showing his games to anyone, not releasing them onto the internet, and so he didn't have anyone outside of himself to connect with. He had no outlet to ground himself on. You can't talk yourself out of loneliness, it doesn't work that way. You can't be the one writing both the questions and the answers, then there's no movement! Then there's no circulation! If all of your anxieties are being channeled into your work, then if the work ever fails you have no backup and you're just going to crash. Seeing this game at the time that he made it, it looked very unhealthy to me. I was watching him do this to himself, and I hated it. I hated seeing him so trapped. Video games are not worth this amount of suffering. This is someone I really cared about, and I used to get so much joy out of seeing him create, for him to suddenly become angry and frustrated like this, it was the worst thing for me. I don't know, this is what I felt at the time, I don't know how else to explain it. I wanted to stop more than anything, I had never felt so rotten. I just... I needed more than I had ever needed anything for this to stop. But it didn't stop. After finishing this one, Coda takes another 7 months and comes up with a new game. Trivia The traditional symbolism of a Torii may suggest that the two-doors puzzle is a sacred place to Coda. This alludes to the levels Entering and Exiting, which occur respectively before and after the level Puzzle. Restarting this chapter can sometimes cause a glitch where the player begins on a square of grass instead of blank white space and can walk around. When the player chooses a dialogue option, they will be teleported and the chapter will resume as normal. Walkthrough (no commentary)